Adaptive Systems and Interaction Group

The Adaptive Systems and Interaction group pursues advances in principles of intelligence and interaction and applications of these advances to enhance computational systems and interfaces. The team includes groups exploring foundations of sensing, learning, and decision making, search and retrieval, and human-computer interaction.

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The best available weather forecasts in the United States—from the federal government’s Winds Aloft program—have been based largely on data from instrumented weather balloons released twice a day, providing forecasts for 176 stations across the United States. Winds Aloft is often not accurate and uses time and fuel resources. The Windflow project explores the research question: Could airplanes in flight be employed as a vast sensor network to determine atmospheric conditions? Could data available today be used…

Interested in evaluating Project Premonition technologies and data? Sign up here Project Premonition aims to detect pathogens before they cause outbreaks Emerging infectious diseases such as Zika, Ebola, Chikungunya and MERS are dangerous and unpredictable. Public health organizations need data as early as possible to predict disease spread and plan responses. Yet early data is very difficult to obtain, because it must be proactively collected from potential disease sources in the environment. Researchers estimate between…

Conversational systems interact with people through language to assist, enable, or entertain. Research at Microsoft spans dialogs that use language exclusively, or in conjunctions with additional modalities like gesture; where language is spoken or in text; and in a variety of settings, such as conversational systems in apps or devices, and situated interactions in the real world. Projects Spoken Language Understanding

We are studying how we can get regular people to do simple tasks at specific locations. An example task is to take a picture of a sign at a certain location. We are interested in who to ask and how much to pay. This is part of a Microsoft Research study about how we can get regular people to do simple tasks at specific locations. This offer is only valid for people who have received…

Home heating uses more energy than any other residential energy expenditure, making increasing the efficiency of home heating an important goal for saving money and protecting the environment. We have built a home-heating system, PreHeat, that automatically programs your thermostat based on when you are home. PreHeat’s goal is to reduce the amount of time a household’s thermostat needs to be on without compromising the comfort of household members. PreHeat System PreHeat builds a predictive…

Diff-IE tracks changes to pages you visit on the Web and shows you what's changed since the last time you visited. Diff-IE is a prototype Internet Explorer Add-on that: Highlights the changes to a webpage since the last time you visited it. Enables you to view—and compare—previously cached versions of a page. When changes are made obvious, especially the subtle and unexpected ones, you get a whole lot more out of the webpages you visit.

LightSpace combines elements of surface computing and augmented reality research to create a highly interactive space where any surface, and even the space between surfaces, is fully interactive. Our concept transforms the ideas of surface computing into the new realm of spatial computing. Instrumented with multiple depth cameras and projectors, LightSpace is a small room installation designed to explore a variety of interactions and computational strategies related to interactive displays and the space that they…

Driver attention is a valuable commodity in maintaining driving safety. However, with the proliferation of many interactive devices that place demands on the driver's attention while driving, effectively allocating attention with the primary goal of managing driving safety presents substantial challenges. With the promise of having semi-autonomous vehicles on the road in the near future followed by a transition to fully autonomous vehicles, we are entering an exciting period of exploration and understanding how drivers adapt to unpredictable demands…

Microsoft Research blog

By Ashish Kapoor, Microsoft Research It’s an exciting time to be a machine intelligence researcher. Recent successes in machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI), which span from achieving human-level parity in speech recognition to beating world champions in board games, indicate the promise of the recent methods. Most of these successes, however, are limited to agents that live and operate in the closed world of software. Such closed-world operations provide two significant advantages to…

Visiting Eric Horvitz at Microsoft Research headquarters in Redmond, Wash., is a full-service experience. At the building’s first-floor bank of elevators, situated on a busy corridor, a “smart elevator” opens its doors, sensing that you need a ride. When you arrive on the third floor, a cute, humanoid robot makes eye contact, senses your interest in getting assistance, and cheerfully asks, “Do you need directions?” You tell him you’re looking for Eric, and the robot…

How do you take a concept from research to product? In the case of the Microsoft Touch Mouse, it took a collection of prototypes, collaboration between transatlantic teams, and a lot of user testing. It also helps when the research that launched the project won the best-paper award during the Association for Computing Machinery’s 22nd Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology. Mouse 2.0: Multi-Touch Meets the Mouse, a joint effort between Microsoft Research Redmond, Microsoft…

By Janie Chang, Writer, Microsoft Research Hallway conversations at UIST 2010 can sound like planning discussions for science-fiction-movie special effects, buzzing with terms such as “wearable computing,” “augmented reality,” and “smart rooms.” UIST, the Association for Computing Machinery’s (ACM’s) Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology, brings together researchers and practitioners of new user interfaces. Taking place in New York City from Oct. 3 to 6, the event features presentations and demos that cover topics…

By Rob Knies, Managing Editor, Microsoft Research Historically, Microsoft Research has had a big footprint during CHI, the annual conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems sponsored by the Association for Computing Machinery’s Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction—and this year’s 27th gathering is no exception. More than 12 percent of the papers accepted for this year’s conference—25 of the 204 to be presented to more than 2,000 attendees from 43 countries April 4-9 at…

By Rob Knies That long-awaited vacation is almost here—just you, your spouse, and your teenage son, all eager to embark on a leisurely adventure to sunny climes for some much-needed R&R. But your planning has not kept pace with your anticipation. There is work to be done: hotels to book, flights to schedule, activities to consider. You need to research and collaborate to reach a decision. Time is growing short, though. How will it all…

Ken Hinckley always thought that searching for information on his computer was like going on a fishing expedition. Every so often, he’d even catch whatever it was he wanted. Hinckley, a senior researcher in the Adaptive Systems and Interaction group at Microsoft Research Redmond, has been netting better results than usual lately. And now he’s angling to share the secret to his success with Tablet PC users everywhere. That secret is InkSeine, an innovative new…

By Rob Knies, Managing Editor, Microsoft Research The research and academic community is rife with conferences. Just about any subject or discipline you can name has its own annual gathering, where the learned and the innovative come together to discuss their work, review the work of others, and connect with friends and colleagues. Few conferences, however, are more eagerly anticipated than CHI, the Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems hosted each year by the…

By Rob Knies, Managing Editor, Microsoft Research On Jan. 8, the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) announced that it had recognized 41 of its members for their contributions to “the practical and theoretical aspects of computing and information technology.” Four of these new ACM fellows are from Microsoft Research: Susan Dumais, Albert Greenberg, Jim Larus, and Harry Shum. The latest ACM fellows were cited for making “significant advances that are having lasting effects on the…

By Rob Knies, Managing Editor, Microsoft Research Eric Horvitz is sitting at his desk in his Redmond, Wash., office, discussing Microsoft Outlook Mobile Manager 2.0 (OMM), a just-released, downloadable add-in for Microsoft Outlook, when something on his computer monitor catches his eye. The new application has flagged as urgent an incoming e-mail from somebody wanting to join the discussion. Moments later, she calls in, gratefully. OMM has made its latest convert. OMM brings the power…

Senior Microsoft Corp. Researcher Susan Dumais predicts that in 10 years, we will look back on today’s search interfaces and recognize them as a simple and limited way to interact with information. After all, she explains, a 5-inch-long rectangle with a long list of text results beneath it doesn’t do much to help people make sense of the billions upon billions of unorganized bits of data in the world. Dumais sees plenty of room for…

By Suzanne Ross, Writer, Microsoft Research The more data you have, the more you know The more you know, the more you forget. The more you forget, the less you know. So why have data? Microsoft Researchers have an answer for this old, slightly twisted riddle. They’ve put together a nifty interface that will find all the data on your PC that you need, be it email, documents, tablet notes or spreadsheets. You can find…

By Suzanne Ross, Writer, Microsoft Research How would you feel if a co-worker barged into your office every few minutes to blurt out updates about their life or project? You might tell them that you are busy, but the damage has been done. You’ve been interrupted, and getting back on task might be difficult. Eric Horvitz and his team in the Adaptive Systems and Interaction group have been working for a number of years on…

By Suzanne Ross Bigger used to be better, but smaller is suddenly superior. The only problem with small versus big in high-tech gadgets is that our eyes weren’t designed to peer at small screens on mobile phones. Even if we are under forty. Eric Horvitz, the research manager for the Adaptive Systems and Interaction group, knew that as small devices such as cell phones and PDAs became an essential part of our lives, we’d want…

By Suzanne Ross People read stories to find out what happens next. That’s easy enough in a book, but if the story is about real life, and it’s online in the news media, it’s harder to find out what happens next. There’s just too much information out there. An Internet search will show you everything on a subject, regardless of whether it’s redundant information or a new twist. Then you have to filter the stories…